Why Anxiety Follows You After Changing Jobs — Same Ground, New Employer

Introduction: The Anxiety That Rides Along in the Luggage

If your present surroundings are what afflict you, then change your surroundings. Move to another company, another occupation, another industry, and surely this sense of enclosure will lift too. When people consider changing jobs, most expect this. And a job change does renew your surroundings: new relationships, new work, sometimes higher pay. In the moment just after the move the air does feel changed. Yet after a while the anxiety comes back — and wearing a face very much like the old one.

Plenty has been written on how to change jobs without regret. What this article places is the question one step before it: why, though you change jobs and change your surroundings, the anxiety at the bottom of your chest does not disappear, but follows you all the way to your new home as if slipped in among the moving boxes.

Let me give the conclusion first. What follows you is the position itself that you occupy. A job change is the act of switching the party who hires you. But your position of being the one who is hired is not changed by a job change. And most career anxiety is born from that position itself.

A Job Change Only Switches the Buyer of Your Labour Power

Look at a job change as a single market. In it, jobseekers put their labour power up for sale and firms try to buy it. Seeking better terms, the jobseeker moves from firm to firm.

Look calmly at what this movement in the market actually is. What the jobseeker moves between is, purely, employers. From Company A to Company B, from B to C, switching the party that buys the labour power. With each move the employer changes. But the jobseeker’s position of being the one who is hired has not, after any of the moves, changed in the least.

It resembles an athlete’s transfer between teams. By the transfer the team changes; the salary may rise. But that the athlete is a player employed to play for a team the transfer does not change. However good the team they move to, they cannot become free of the possibility of having their contract cut. What a job change buys is better terms — not a guarantee against being cut.

The Root of the Anxiety Is the State of Being Employed Itself

Why does the state of being employed itself become the root of the anxiety?

The economist Marx called the condition of the modern worker the “double freedom” [Marx, 1867]. The worker is free of the bonds of feudal status, and free also in the sense of holding no means of production — the ground that produces value. One who holds no means of production has, in order to live, no choice but to sell their labour power. It was Uno Kōzō who later organised this into a system of economics [Uno, 1964].

To have nothing to sell but labour power means that your life depends completely on the existence of a buyer for that labour power. If the buyer says I do not need your labour power, you lose your ware. If the buyer says more cheaply, you either accept the terms or go looking for another buyer. This state of having the rope of your livelihood held by a buyer is, in itself, a ceaseless source of anxiety. However capable you are, as long as you are on the side that sells labour power, you cannot escape this fundamental instability. The reason phrases like washed up after thirty-five frighten people so much is that they point, plainly, to this root that ordinarily stays hidden.

▸ How this weariness with the very position of selling labour power turns the eyes away from the root is treated in “I don’t want to work” is not indulgence.

Moving and Advancing Are Different Things

Here lies a deep-seated illusion about careers. We think of switching employers and improving our terms as advancing in a career. But switching employers and stepping down from the position of being employed are movements in entirely different directions.

Why the relief that arrives just after a job change ends as a honeymoon can be explained by the same structure. While the new place is fresh, your attention is on the new surroundings themselves. There is much to learn, and that busyness temporarily covers over the anxiety at the root. But as you grow used to the surroundings and the busyness turns into everyday life, the cover comes off, and the anxiety that was at the root shows its face again. Growing used to a place also means that the buried problem of your position becomes visible once more. So the effect of a job change runs out at the same speed at which the newness fades. Whether the place you moved to is a good company or a bad one has little to do with how the effect runs out.

Let me draw a careful distinction here. I am not denying the job change itself. If your present workplace damages your mind or body, moving from it is the right choice. Moving in search of better terms is your natural right. What I am saying is that if you expect too much power to change your position from a job change, you will be betrayed. A job change is powerful for horizontal movement, but for the vertical movement of position it is, in principle, powerless. To change jobs knowing this limit, and to keep entrusting a job change with the resolution of your anxiety and being betrayed again and again, are — for the same movement — states of mind that differ utterly.

Conclusion: Do Not Mistake Freedom of Movement for Power to Change Position

Anxiety follows you after a job change because what you are moving is the employer, while the state of being employed itself has not changed. However rich your freedom of movement, as long as the door out of the position of selling labour power stays shut, you are only moving horizontally across the same ground.

What is needed is not a search for a better place to move to. It is not mistaking freedom of movement for power to change your position. And then, steering little by little not in the direction of raising the price tag but in the direction of stepping off the side that has one attached — the direction of holding your own means of production. Receive the overall blueprint as your next step. How this problem of position works across career anxiety as a whole is gathered in why career advancement never quiets your anxiety about the future.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Marx, K. Das Kapital, Band I (1867) Verlag von Otto Meissner
• Uno, K. Principles of Political Economy (1964) Iwanami Shoten